Tuesday, December 21, 2010

I write to you now from my parent’s house in Petaluma, California, in what will be my last post as a WWF EXPLORE Volunteer in Madagascar. It seems a rather short three months ago that I began this blog in Antananarivo, excited and uncertain about the experience ahead. It is surreal now to be faced with the task of reflecting back.

If Tana was culture shock, then America, land of plenty, is like being hit with a tidal wave and turned upside-down. The developed world as a whole has been astonishing, delighting, and terrifying me since I stepped off of that first of many airplanes in Paris Charles-de-Gaulle Airport last Wednesday. First, it was soda with ice that knocked me out of my seat. I felt like Tom Hanks in Castaway as I gulped cold Sprite and chowed down on frozen cubes in my AirFrance seat. Forevermore, I am going to feel nostalgic for Madagascar when tasting warm beverages.

Then, it was the weather—as I descended the stairs onto the tarmac in Paris, the girl standing in line before me commented that, “Cold just feels weird.” Weird, indeed, and she had most likely only been vacationing in Madagascar for a few weeks. For me, who in the past three months has come to know that far-off island in the middle of the sea as home, it was beyond bizarre to hop on an airplane overnight and wake up in a different hemisphere in a different season. Winter…who has ever heard of that? And Christmas…wow, I nearly forgot that it was supposed to be happening sometime soon.

Then it was on to Madrid through the endlessly fascinating and confusing world of international travel. I found myself excitedly abandoning my barebones diet of rice and beans in Barajas Airport and settling down to a truly gluttonous meal of extra cheesy tortilla española and chocolate con churros, but I’d barely made it through half of the quiche-like tortilla, before I started feeling faintly queasy. I guess it will take more than a few hours to acclimate myself to a dairy-based diet once more; cheese and milk-based products just didn’t really exist in Vondrozo. And who knows how many parasites I’ve managed to pick up abroad? What Kuni has dubbed the “extraterrestrial” in my stomach didn’t seem too excited about the chocolate either…

From Madrid, I made my way across the Atlantic to New York’s JFK International Airport, an overwhelming welcome to America after five months spent out of my home country (for those of you less familiar with the details of my life’s travel, I spent the summer traveling Europe before voyaging on to Madagascar). I was tickled to discover an advertisement for World Wildlife Fund’s “Save the Tiger” campaign just outside American Airlines security—so reminiscent of that WWF donation bin in Paris three months ago at the start of my Malagasy adventures…Here, like before, I left a small contribution—in American dollars, this time, instead of euros—but I know that my real contribution lay in all I have learned and experienced in the past three months.

Being back in America is both amazing and distressing. Everything inspires awe. My first meal in JFK—a cheese quesadilla with guacamole and sour cream was astonishing, but no less so was the tall glass of ice water the waitress brought me without my asking; I could drink it safely without adding chlorine or UV light! But then I found myself stunned by the plastic straw in its paper wrapper that she set beside the cup, not to mention the stack of disposable napkins she tossed on my table. Who needs these things? I thought to myself…And where do they go after I finish with them?

I spent the weekend decorating my home for Christmas alongside my mother and father, and when we tired of Christmas carols, I pulled up Youtube on my laptop—internet powered, of course, by the wireless network in our house. “What do you want to listen to?” I asked my mom. “Every song in the world is at my fingertips…” And that is what America is like—everything in the world at my fingertips. And yet not. There are a few songs that have escaped Youtube’s archives…Where are “Voay” and “Assuré” and the many other cheerful Malagasy melodies that have danced across the radio incessantly for the past three months? They are not there.

Indeed, it seems hard to believe that Madagascar can exist at all from the perspective of Christmastime in the San Francisco Bay Area. At first, just after my arrival, I found myself converting every purchase into Ariary, but I long ago abandoned that habit because it makes me vaguely nauseous. Things here cost 2,000 times what they cost in Madagascar, and that is just the way they are. I pay what they cost in American dollars, and I try not to think about the difference.

When I wander through our local Safeway, I remember the market in Vondrozo, and I can barely believe that there are still people there now, buying rice and beans and manioc leaves while I browse the packaged foods and produce bins offering vegetables from all over the world. When I shower in my parent’s master bathroom, all pink tile and hot water—how many times did I dream of that in Madagascar?—I struggle to remember that the cold bucket bath in Behavana is still a reality and that there are people there, today, now, who are still using it.

PCV Brian called us a week ago when we were still in country, and he was home for his brother’s wedding in Hawaii. He said that people always talk about reverse culture shock with Peace Corps Volunteers returning to the developed world, but for his short visit, he was dealing well with it. “I basically just separate this world from that world,” he said. “But I guess that is the problem, too.”

Yes, that is certainly the problem. Petaluma, California and Vondrozo, Madagascar are both realities, existing at the same time and on the same planet. I have the luxury of being able to flit between the two, inconvenienced only by some jetlag and a few uncomfortable hours (okay maybe more than a few) in an airline seat. But how to wrap my head around the idea that Vondrozo continues to exist when I have left it and that, for so many other people, escape is not an option? That is the challenge ahead of us as we move forward on the path towards sustainable human development. How to make Vondrozo exist on the same plane as Petaluma and yet avoid destroying our environment in the process…?

For my part, the work is far from over, and the need to return to Africa burns strong within me. Fortunately for me, life has seen fit to send me back to the Dark Continent in almost too short a time. In just under two weeks, I will be leaving the good ol’ US of A once more to head, this time, to Kenya, where I will be spending most of 2011 working on a project investigating land use change, fluctuations in small mammal populations, and human infectious disease risk in East Africa. The project will be much more science-heavy than the work I have been doing in Madagascar (not much conservation by cooking this time), but there is also a critically important applied aspect to the project that deals with education and information for the local population. I am beyond excited to be able to take all that I have learned in Madagascar and apply it, so soon, to this new project in Kenya.

And though I am moving on for the immediate future, there remains much work to be done in Madagascar and in the Vondrozo Corridor, in particular. From afar, EXPLORE volunteers will continue to teach and communicate—our videos are completed now and awaiting a few technical glitches to be sorted out before they will take their place on this website and others. There are presentations ahead, too, and articles left to write, and help to be sought. For those of you who have been impressed and inspired by the efforts of WWF in Madagascar, you can learn more and help contribute to the cause at the WWF international website (http://wwf.panda.org/how_you_can_help/) or the Madagascar-specific site (http://madagascar.panda.org/aboutus/how_you_can_help/).

And, who knows? Once Kenya is behind me, there is no telling what could come next. Madagascar was my first real foray into hands-on conservation and sustainable development, and for that, it will always hold a special place in my heart. There are many people and places that still tie me to the country, and with so much possibility on its environmental horizon, I may just have to go back someday.

For now, though, the road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began…

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Saturday, December 11, 2010

I woke up this morning in my comfortable twin bed in Tana, and I didn’t quite know what to think. I’m going through some serious culture shock in Madagascar’s metropolitan capital city—I video edited until 2am last night, enjoying the luxury of 24-hour electricity and high speed internet, but I found myself awake again with the early morning light at 5am per Vondrozo usual. The rest of the Tana population, however, seems to sleep a bit later than those Vondrozoans, and when Kuni, Christa, Henintsoa, and I left our hotel in search of morning sakafo, we found the city quiet and deserted…except, of course, for those few revelers still making their way home from an epic night at la boite (French for nightclub). And as for what we ate—pain au chocolat and café au lait—I might as well have been in Paris, not Madagascar. Kind of different from all those breakfasts of rice and peanuts sur terrain.

I’ve never been much of a city girl, and life in Tana stresses me out somewhat with its complexity. Not only can I now read your blog comments, but I am also painfully aware of the 1400 unread messages in my email inbox. Sigh. It is time to take myself off of some of those nostalgic Stanford email lists. Anyway, I have only 3 days left in Madagascar, and our team has seven videos to finish, one brochure to write, one website to design, and a host of final reports to put together. Sort of like finals week back home…You might say that life is busy.

There are a few things in Tana that have really thrown me for a loop after three months in the remote south. My first instinct this morning was to get up and run for the faucet with my water bottle—in Vondrozo, the water runs only consistently between the hours of 6am and 7am, and if you miss it in the morning, there’s a chance you’ll be going thirsty all day…or contributing to global plastic disposal problems by buying a bottle of Eau Vive, Madagascar’s equivalent to Arrowhead or Evian. In Tana, though, the faucet runs when you turn it on, and if you turn it towards the red side, the water is hot! Such a novelty—I haven’t had a hot shower since mid-September…

In addition—and this might be a bit too much information, but in the spirit of one who has become comfortable talking about all bodily functions, I am going to share anyway—the first time I sat down on the toilet yesterday (and a real toilet with a seat, at that!), I found myself searching in vain for the trash can in which to deposit the paper. But there was no trash can because—imagine that—in Tana, people flush their toilet paper down the drain…

And then there is the language. Henintsoa, who was born in Madagascar and still has family in Tana, couldn’t be happier. As members of the Merina ethnicity, the light-skinned residents of Antananarivo and the neighboring high plateau, both she and Ranto are at home with the crisp, clear accent of the region. People here greet each other with “Manahoana”—not “Akoraby” or even “Salama”—and they seem to enunciate their letters more cleanly than those in the Southeast. As an example, the Malagasy equivalent of “there is…” or “is there…” is the word “misy”, which Ranto and Henintsoa pronounce as you might expect: “meee-seee.” In Vondrozo, however, we’ve learned to eat the ends of our words, and we say, “meeesch.”

And so we return from the field a bit more boorish than we left, you might say. Our clothes are all disgusting, for clean means something different in Tana than it did in Vondrozo, and the WWF Tana staff all chuckle appreciatively at our Sudest accents. Perhaps our favorite phrase, so obviously uncultivated, is “da zaka be” (dah-zak-ah-bay), which means, basically, “How gigantic!” There really is no Malagasy officialy (the Merina dialect) equivalent, but to give you an idea of its usage, you might think of Sergio’s shoe size…

In general, our team is very small—I, at 5 feet, 4 inches, am the tallest of the girls, and we all wear an American shoe size of 5 or 6. Ranto is not a whole lot bigger than any of the girls, but Sergio, though skinny, towers over 6 feet. His shoes are comparatively enormous, especially his hulking hiking boots. When Sergio fell in a river during our second séjour sur terrain, he worried that his boots would take days to dry. However, with my unfortunately extensive experience trying to salvage water-logged iPhones, I had already introduced him to the drying properties of a bowl of rice. A night of sleep in a bowl of rice saved his Canon camera during our first field excursion, and impressed by the efficacy of the method, Sergio proposed filling his boots with rice during the second sejour to dry them out. In Madagascar, rice is measured by the kapoaky (kah-pook), or cup, and Ranto argued that we couldn’t waste rice on Sergio’s shoes because they’d take two kapoakys each to fill. To give you a sense for comparison, the six of us together eat about three kapoakys of rice in total in a given meal. Sergio’s feet are, you could say, “da zaka be.”

There may not be anything officially “da zaka be” in Tana, but we are proud of our southeastern heritage, as we come to view it now. I admit I appreciate some of the luxuries of life in the capital—my feet, for one, are no longer pussing and weeping with dirt and flies—but I miss the Madagascar I have come to know as home. Already, I feel as though the trip has ended in a lot of ways, even though I am still eleven hours of time difference and many thousand miles from California. Though sad for this incredible experience to come to an end, I am also eager to return to my real home and family—if only for a short while—before it is on again to the next crazy venture…

Time to go edit some more video…Don’t miss Henintsoa’s newest update to the blog (à la droite if you “mahay français” as they Malagasy say), and happy holidays until I write again!

Thursday, December 2, 2010

“It’s hard to be efficient in this country,” I say to Peace Corps education volunteer, Erica Wherry, one evening after dinner in Vondrozo. “That,” she says, “is very true.”

Madagascar is the land of “mora mora,” meaning that everyone takes life slow. For the most part, as I draw to the end of my three months in country, I realize that I have come to terms with a pace of existence so different from that which I knew back home. I have grown accustomed to changes in the schedule, to unforseen challenges, to waiting for things to happen. “Nothing teaches patience like life in Madagascar,”says Brian. That, also, is very true.

However, in these last two weeks of work time in Vondrozo—our field excursions finished and our only remaining work of the computer and desk variety—I find a renewed frustration and an eagerness for resources that are not, and will not be, at my disposal for some time yet. How much I would love to fact-check my statistics with a quick search on GoogleScholar, how nice it would be to charge the video camera in the morning and skip out to the countryside for a few shots in the late afternoon! As it is, however, our work capacity is handicapped by four hours of computer battery and the strict hours of city-wide electricity—5pm to midnight on weekdays, noon to midnight on those precious weekends.

Not that there aren’t plenty of other things to do when the electronic work can’t be done! As Christa says, “Cooking takes twice as long here”, for all meals come from scratch, and dry rice and beans take a long time to cook. Our favorite, delectable, chickpea-like bean, voanjo-bory, takes a full three hours to prepare to a satisfactory softness, but we think nothing of it. Three hours for meal preparation is nothing in Madagascar—just think of Maman’Dilo and the chickens!

The simple tasks like laundry and dishes take much longer, too, for everything is done by hand. You can’t exactly multi-task while waiting for the laundry when it is you who must scrub and brush and attack the clothes that are never really going to be clean again, anyway. It takes me almost two hours to do a load of wash, and then who knows how long to dry if the wet-season rains start in again in the late afternoon.

And so, life has its challenges in Madagascar—perhaps felt all the more in the semi-civilized environment of Vondrozo. In the field, at least, we are so removed from the technological world that it is futile to worry about it much. In Vondrozo, we are more aware of developed-world expectations and developing-world resources, but I dare not complain—life here is wonderful, still. There are mitsangstanganas and soccer matches and breaks to walk to the corner stand for coffee and mofo’akondro, the delicious fried bananas that are somewhat of a southeastern Malagasy specialty. I’ve already decided to one day open a restaurant in the U.S. called Café Fary, serving sugarcane coffee and all types of mofo treats. Maybe the proceeds can help fund Vondrozo National Park. Christa recommends mats on the floor and bamboo decor, and Brian suggests that Berkeley, CA might be a receptive venue. We’ll see if this Stanford grad can bring herself to make the move...

This is goodbye again for a short while. As with many things in Madagascar, our internet key is broken, and my communications are posted at the expense of our Peace Corps friends’ limitless generosity. However, Brian is currently en route to Hawaii for his brother’s wedding, and Erica is soon to leave us, too, for In-Service-Training in Tana. So, in addition to losing friends in Vondrozo, we also lose internet next week, and the blog must fall silent again.

We are scheduled to arrive in Tana next Saturday, December 11, and at that time, I will write again with closing thoughts and final news from the eighth continent. Goodbye for now, and I hope you enjoy reading the new posts about our most recent adventures sur terrain. Stay tuned for videos and photos and all wifi-requiring blog additions in a week!

Our adventures throughout the past month sur terrain have taken us through rainforest, under waterfalls, over ricefields. Already, I have waxed philosophic and gushed with religious fervor about the complexity of the ecosystem, the beauty of the landscape, the conservationist dreams that I entertain daily. And while it is true that interactions with the natural environment of Madagascar formed the basis of our ecotourism research over the past few weeks, we would have been neglecting the “holistic” component of sustainable development had we not also spent considerable time investigating the customs of the people we encountered along the way. Ecotourism in the Vondrozo Forest Corridor means changes for both animals and people that inhabit the jungle.

And so we were anthropologists as well as ecologists this past month in the field, taking an hour or two in each settlement’s tranobe to talk with the COBA president, the village elders, or the panzaka—a “king”of ancient Malagasy custom. In every locale, we learned about the origin of people, name, and village, about the religious customs and traditional festivals practiced in the region, about the crops cultivated, the animals raised.

We started our trajectory in the haute plateau region of the Betsileo people, masters of riziculture, then crossed through the forest and headed southwest into the land of Bara and Antisaka. We did our best to keep the changing dialect in mind, calling out the Arab-influenced greeting, “Salama,” in Betsileo territory before giving way to the more familiar “Akoraby” as our feet carried us towards the coastal southwest, our home.

In the commerce town of Moroteza, three ethnic groups met on Saturday market day to make an exchange of goods. The Betsileo came from the western towns of easy highway access, bringing oil, petrol, and manufactured products from the cities of Amabalavao and Fianarantsoa. The Bara came from the south, bringing products of the forest—honey, zebu, and the sugarcane moonshine, tokagasy. The local Antisaka subgroup, Tanala, added rice, manioc, and café fary to the great exchange.

In addition to these more innocent staples of food and drink, however, market day in Moroteza bore witness to a trading venue for golden flakes and ten thousand ariary bills. I have already mentioned something of the Malagasy mining craze in previous blogs but have yet to fully explain this new and worrisome social development.

In 1998, the discovery of sapphires in the southern frontier region of Ilakaka, Madagascar resulted in some one-hundred thousand Malagasy leaving home for the mines. One can hardly blame a population, the majority of which lives on less than one U.S. dollar per day—digging for sapphires is some three to five times more lucrative than the traditional livelihood of farming. In the Vondrozo Forest Corridor, discoveries of gold deposits within the past few years have only extended the influence of this nationwide search for quick and easy money. Increasingly, local residents abandon the rice fields to pan for gold; meanwhile, more red earth is removed from the forest and washed into the muddy rivers.

It is hardly surprsing then, that when we continue our Message in the Bottle project, asking the question, “What aspect of the environment of Madagascar is most important to you?”, some people answer, “vola,” or money. They sell lambas, which proudly proclaim, “Ny vola no hozatriní fianana”, which translates roughly as, “Money is the muscle of life.” Christa bought one such lamba by accident—its colors were very pretty!—and was horrified when Ranto informed her of its meaning. She now folds it artfully to conceal its superficial message whenever she wears it; indeed, she was forced to half-undress, so I could copy the words down for this blog entry.

For many people, the idea of “tontolo iainana,” the Malagasy translation for “environment,” is a difficult concept to swallow, and Ranto often has to elaborate and explain his word choice. Other Malagasy that we encounter, however, are not so disillusioning, and everywhere, in our anthropological pursuits, we hear thanks for the work that WWF is doing in the region and concern about Madagascar’s environmental future.

Philomene, president of the women’s group in the small village of Tsaratanana, tells us, “Thank you for asking me this question. You learn things from hearing our responses, but we learn things too from thinking about and answering your question.” And that, in a nutshell, is precisely what we had dreamed for.

The rainy season comes late in Madagascar this year, and good thing, too, for we are woefully unprepared for the torrential downpours typical of the winter (austral summer) months in this country. We’ve left most of the inadequate canvas tents provided in Tana behind and are relying on WWF Vondrozo’s stock of nylon “Freetime” tents, a Malagasy mark that seems to specialize in one-time use, disposable products. Incredibly, the tents look the same as any you might find in Europe or North America—indeed, their design is the exact same as Brian’s tent which he purchased abroad in France—but the only difference is that all of the WWF tents break and his does not.

We get creative with tent pole combinations and DUCT tape patching (thankfully, Kuni was a better outdoor leader than me and brought some to Madagascar), but when the rain starts to fall in earnest, we find ourselves battling outside in the elements, digging trenches and building levees around our flimsy plastic structures in an effort to keep our cameras—if not our persons—dry. Florent says that because of “la grande chaleur”—the great heat, in reference to climate change—the local wet season onset has been delayed more and more every year. In the old days, he claims anecdotally, the rains set in as early as mid October. Thankfully for us, we don’t really start to experience the wrath of the monsoon season until our last week sur terrain in late November.

While we may be pleased about the prolonged dryness, the changing climate patterns bode ill for the Malagasy people, whose lives are tied so closely to the seasonal calendar. According to Ranto, the end of the dry season marks the “periode de soudure,” a time of scarcity and suffering when dry season crops are all but spent and wet season crops have yet to sprout.
During our first field excursion, we carried rice and beans with us throughout the séjour but regularly bought various additions and accompaniments to our dry goods—vegetables, meats, sometimes eggs—in the villages we encountered. This time through, we discover that vegetables are rarely available, that rice is overpriced, and that the population is, in general, edgy and hungry. Somehow, the distended bellies of the children in every village seem more pronounced or at least more evident. I am particularly shaken one evening when a skinny black cat sneaks into tranobe to nibble the scraps spilled from our dinner. The poor baby scarfs down forgotten rice kernels on the mats under our knees like there is no tomorrow; maybe there is not, after all. I think of Sassy back home, turning up her nose when Mom buys the wrong flavor of Fancy Feast. What might she say if she knew that cats in Madagascar are so hungry that they’ll eat unaccompanied rice? Knowing Sassy, though, I doubt she’d be very sympathetic...

I mentioned previously that it is custom to give the gift of a chicken when a visitor arrives to a village in the rural southeast; our last session in the field bore witness to enough chicken slaughters to make a native Petaluman proud of her heritage. This time around, however, the gifts are few and far between, and if the carnivorous among us are craving meat, it is more likely that we buy a chicken and more likely still that it is mangy and scrawny. Maman’Dilo has a gift for turning a small drumstick and spoonful of chicken broth into a delectable meal when paired with rice, and I pause briefly to marvel at the casualness with which she prepares our food. For me back home, cooking a chicken for a party of twelve would be the cuisine event of the month, if not the year; I’d stress about it for weeks beforehand and feel relief only when the plates were washed and the guests on their way home. For Maman’Dilo, it is something that is suggested at 4pm and ready by 7pm—routine, simple, no questions asked.

For those of us who have become habituated to consuming a mountain of rice three times a day, it was at first disconcerting to discover this séjour sur terrain that those mountains were eroding away. We never went hungry, of course, but the quantities diminished to a noticeable extent—enough certainly to make us aware of the scarcity around us. We are all a little bit delighted, I think, to find ourselves back in Vondrozo where food is more readily available, and where the onset of the life-giving rains and wet season fruits is more than apparent. For 100 ariary (about 5 U.S. cents), you can spend all morning “hoovering” (Christa’s favorite verb) some two dozen delectable lychee fruits; for 400 ariary (20 cents), you can eat a whole pineapple; and if you are feeling truly profligate, for 3000 ariary ($1.50 U.S.), you can always go to the hotely next door for a zebu steak and a plate of French fries. And at Behavana, misy ketchup—always.

You may laugh at the absurdity of it all, but remember the tragedy, as well. For the Malagasy, these are hard, hard times, indeed.

.Christa's blog contributions...

An Ode to Peanuts. 3 December 2010.

Grown right here in Madagascar! I have quickly learned the many names by which they call this treasure to ensure that I never miss an opportunity to sample them (or outright gorge myself): arachide, cacouette, or pistache are widely understood French-isms; or, to be more authentic , voanjo (“voo-an-zoo”) is their proper title in Malagasy Officialy.

In Vondrozo there are two elderly women at opposite ends of the market that prepare voanjo for streetfood-style consumption. Justine runs the peanut operation near our favourite coffee/mofo-akondro stand, where you can buy roasted, salted peanuts by the teaspoon for 10 Ariary per spoon. That amounts to CDN$0.005, or half a penny, per spoon. She loves to count with me as I dish roasted peanuts into my insufficiently sized palm: raiky, roa, telo, efatry, …, FOLO! Ten. I worry daily that this amount might be viewed as gluttonous and so I make use of both stands in succession to satisfy my obsession. Martina sells them as candied peanut bark for 50 Ariary per piece, also known as bonbon voanjo or Cracker Jacks to the American crowd. Not only a penny-pincher for a snack, but the Kinesiologist in me notes that they also serve a multitude of nutritional purposes, including the necessary protein to stabilize blood sugar levels and foster longer attention spans while working (for example to prepare outstanding videos for WWF). Really, the more I learn about this SuperFood in Madagascar, the more infatuated I become.

The plant itself is rather insignificant-looking with frail green leaves that have seemingly given up on life – barely able to hold themselves up off the ground. Next to the mighty cabbages, manioc, and cucumbers that grow alongside them, the peanut appears to be the runt of the Malagasy veggie patch. But then it is always the one you least suspect that pulls out something spectacular, isn’t it? If you follow those frail stems underground you will be faced with an intricate array of bulbous hard shells cluttering the root system of the plant. Yes, peanuts grow in the ground. The Plantars peanut himself was born of the soil. The twins encased within each bulb hold a key to mitigating many of the nutritional deficiencies of the developing world. As a major source of protein, fatty acids, and essential vitamins, peanuts can serve as a nutritional accompaniment to any meal and even substitute for meat. They do not spoil easily and taste good in both sweet and savoury recipes.

WWF Madagascar has already realized the potential of the peanut and so incorporated its cultivation as a primary workshop in their Holistic Conservation Project for the Vondrozo region. As Cara has mentioned in her Conservation by Cooking entry, this has been the focus of our last three months in country: growing and cooking with peanuts. Once you’ve sampled fresh, organically grown peanuts, roasted and crushed to a natural peanut butter in a giant mortar and pestle, then lightly salted and served alongside rice and a ripe banana plucked from the tree just outside your tent, there is certainly no other worldly comparison. Ever striving to practice-what-[I]-preach, I feel justified by my morning tour of the Vondrozo market, promoting the future economy and cultivation of peanuts for the Malagasy people.

Tiako voanjo!

The ultimate ice-breaker. 26 September 2010.

This week we were invited to a private dinner at the gazebo of the Chinese-Malagasy couple. To access the private dining room we had to battle the hutong-esque maze behind their convenience shopdodging maimed stray dogs and massive sacks of overflowing rice,always wondering if one of those massive palm-sized spiders will ever drop down on our heads. We arrive at a dimly lit large dining table somewhere in the backstreets of Vondrozo. We are served a deliciously traditional Malagasy meal: mountains of rice, a side dish of grated carrots and cucumber in a tangy vinaigrette, and a side dish with three modest pieces of chicken in tomato sauce. These feasts are always served with several bowls of chicken bouillon to offer some welcome flavour and moisture to the remains of Mt. Rice and several pitchers of ‘rice tea’ prepared by boiling water in the burnt bottom of the rice pot. While it is a little odd to the ways of Western cooking, the simplicity of Malagasy ingredients make every meal indisputably tasty.

Coming back to the Chinese heritage of our hosts, we notice partway through our meal two mysteriously small sauce bowls holding no more than half a tablespoon of red chilli sauce. I admit, I was a little confused at the miniscule portion offered to a table of ten people, but this premonition did not learn the ever-eager traveller in me. Always looking for ways to confirm my love of spicy food in public places, I take a generous portion of mystery sauce in my next bite. It tastes fabulous, but before I’ve even swallowed one mouthful my body spastically revolts into tremors of hiccups, coughs, involuntary salivary gland secretions, and tears. Our bottles of orange soda haven’t arrived yet and rice does little to chase the chilli. I suffer rudely for a few minutes while my colleagues (understandably) have a good laugh at my expense. When I finally manage to regain my senses I aggressively retort: “Sergio, if you are so happy to laugh and act all tough, why don’t you try it?” Ever-ready to defend his orgullo (Spanish for ‘pride’) Sergio takes a timid bite. He is fine. I am crushed. My one chance at payback to my teasing nemesis and I’ve failed.

The conversation moves on to other things and after about 60 seconds I return my gaze to Sergio at my side – he is red in the face, his lips are pursed, and he looks as though he is about to burst. Noticing my attention his body caves and projectile tears erupt from his eyes. He laughs his loud jolly laugh, wipes the tears and cries, “what is happening to me?” in his thick Spanish accent. We all have a good laugh, for we know that Sergio has left his orgullo in Spain for precisely such occasions. Funny how the greatest icebreakers sometimes come in the form of a little competition and the tiniest speck of Nature’s treasures: chilli.

The wide-eyed boy. 19 September 2010.

Exploring the tsena (market) in search of our morning Madagascar coffee, laced with equal parts coffee and sugar, all eyes of Farafangana are upon us. All eyes, except for those of a young boy no more than two years old, who wobbles along with uncertain steps chanting loudly to himself and whomever else cared to listen. He ambles through our cluster of six, oblivious to the vazahas until the last moment when his eyes stumble upon Brian’s feet. He stops dead in his tracks. He slowly, carefully raises his gaze, eyes wide, to gawk at this monster before him. Ghostly white with pale blue eyes and brite yellow scarecrow hair. What’s worse, this monster smiles at him and greets him, not with the gurgle of a monster, but in Malagasy! While our language skills assist in making friends of the adult variety, the child simply cannot understand.

Sergio’s Blog Entry: Five Reasons to Love Madagascar

Here I am, answering to the call to arms from Cara, who has already got exhausted of trying to convince us to write something for her blog about our Malagasy experience. And yes, I do really think that I have waited too long before writing something. Specially now, that most of my friends are connected to this webpage from various and remote places of the globe (because everywhere is remote from here, which is almost the same than saying that we are extremely far away from the rest of the civilization).

For all the readers, I think I should start by excusing myself for the poor prose, grammatical faults and lacerant vocabulary poverty. But I am Spanish, not an English native speaker, and since I am equally proud of my English skills as of my accent, I will try to do my best.

I am writing this text in Farafangana, a small and charming city in the Southeastern coast of Madagascar. We have spent the last few days surrounded by the sweaty riksaw drivers, the fleas and the mosquitoes; with our feet always half drowned in the sand that floods the streets; looking for the mysterious man that sells delicious bread with chocolate in the afternoons (which I have never seen perssonaly, reason why I am starting to believe that it is merely an urban legend, opposite to the girl’s statements); having our sugar with coffee in the extremely chaotic market of the city under the always-aware looks of the locals and, in definitive, enjoying of our short three-day resting break in just the middle of the program. During these days I have had a few moments in which to think about what could I write for Cara’s blog, blaming “this damned girl has already taken the best things and wrote about them, what the h*** am I going to talk about?”. So, a bit demoralized, I have finally seen the light in the end of the tunnel. I am aware that my idea is not precisely original, so keep that commentary to yourselves, please. Nevertheless, it gives me the opportunity to show you some of the things that are making our time here so interesting and enjoyable and have still not appeared in the blog.

Hence, without more preamble, I proceed to show you my selected five reasons to love Madagascar, its people and its nature!

1 – The children “Bonjour vazaha!”. This is the constant cry that you hear absolutely everywhere you go. And, of course, even though you have heard it already a thousand times, even though you know perfectly what is going to happen next, even if you have just arrived from a long walk under the justice sun of the tropic of Cancer or just woken up in the morning, it doesn’t mind: you turn your head with delight, see the expectant faces of a group of small boys and girls with widely open eyes and crystalline smiles, who try desperately to hide one behind the other, timidly, and answer “Akorabe!”, showing your most friendly face with and your best smile. Of course it is nothing new, and it happens 25 times a day, but you cannot help that you face shines a bit when you see their nicely surprised face after hearing your answer in Malagasy and answer, timidly and excited and the same time, “Tsara be. Akorabe”. And you all laugh in this very moment of connection and complicity.

By this moment, I am sure everybody has realized that I really like children, and concretely the Malagasy kids. But I cannot help it. They are absolutely charming. Maybe it is because their curiosity towards strangers, maybe for the way their smiles fill their dark and colorful faces, or maybe because of the intonation they use when they pronounce “vazaha”. But their never-ending joy, cries and looks make our work way much easier and nice.

This reminds me a funny anecdote. During our “three musketeers” time in the village of Vohimary Nord, we spent the beginning of an evening exchanging songs with the children of the village, all sat down in a big circle around us. After a long series of songs, in which we sang one, and the children followed with a demonstration of a traditional song of the area, we finally arrived to one song that we all knew: the Waka Waka, by Shakira, which is really popular in the island. We finished improvising a choreography and dancing this song with them, in front of the astonished look of the WWF agents and the parents of all those kids.

2 – The breakfasts Probably one of the things that we are looking forward most to when we arrive back from our adventures to Vondrozo is not sleeping in the comfortable bed of the hotelis. Is not a meal in a restaurant, nor the taste of meat after three weeks eating rice three times per day, nor simply having rest for a while. Not. All those things are good, but they are not up to the wonderful breakfasts of Vondrozo. Every morning, when we all are finally awake, we meet together and walk until one of the small street shops in the nearest corner, where we have coffee and just made “mofo-akondro”. Black coffee with a ton of sugar on it, and the delicious fried bananas that are making us addicted: the perfect combination!

3 – The color of the soil and its unexpected consequences For a person that was brought up in Europe this is something absolutely new, whereas for the Malagasy people is something absolutely obvious and natural: “Really? What’s the color of the soil in Europe, then?”. So you answer that black, brown or even yellow, but never like this! The soil of Madagascar is red. Red like and oxidized metal, or a brilliant ferruginous orange, and its powder spreads over everything.

This everything includes the air. Hopefully my lungs are already red, and all that ruddy dust won’t make a noticeable difference down there. Most of the time you don’t realize of this fact, you are simply wondering how can your clothes earn that color so fast, making your laundry a never ending business. But under some circumstances you can perceive it. This was the case of the first electric storm that we attended, in Vohilava. It was so unbelievable that when the lightning struck, all the sky were painted in red!

Or, for example, one night back in Vondrozo, I felt so suspicious: “I’d swear that yesterday the moon didn’t have that color”. But, effectively, the satellite had turned orange. In opposition, the following night it was tinted in a fluorescent yellow, like the one of the highlighters.

All this phenomena have trapped all my attention on the last days, and keep me looking forward the next and non-expected change in the color of the things. But I think none of them can beat the sunsets. Seeing all the sky painted in the most vivid bloody red color you have ever seen while the sun sinks beyond a horizon silhouetted by the contours of the ravinalas... is simply priceless.

4 – The continuous challenge Maybe for other people that wouldn’t be a reason to love nothing. But for us, it plays a key role in our experience. Challenges help you to develop your personality, to test and expand your limits or to discover new facets of your skills and abilities that you previously ignored. And in this country, everything is a challenge.

Eating rice three times per day is a challenge, for not speaking of the rest of aspects of this new diet: lack of milk and lactic products in general, small rations of everything (but rice), not much variety...

The living conditions are a challenge: living in a tent built up in the middle of the village, having the woods as toilet and the river as shower and washing machine, having no clock but the sunset and the sunrise, having to walk from village to village either with an infernal sun or an inclement rain, discovering that your boots, that have survived to several trips and hikes, are not up to the task...

The weather is a challenge: the sun, the rain, the humidity of the air, the fact that it is almost impossible to do nothing useful from 11 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon (half of the time you spend awake) due to the merciless heat...

The communication...

All the animals that are trying (and generally succeeding) to feed on you...

Surely, an experience that is not for all the audiences.

5 – The smells This is one of the first things you realize from the very moment you land in Antananarivo: the innumerable, diverse and embriagating smells that flow over the country, trying to overcome over each other towards your senses. In the big city, the parfum of the air changes every two or three meters, ranging to the smoke of cars, the flowers, the food of restaurants, the barbecue or the infinity of unknown particules that float in the air of Tana.

Out in the field, the smells become less varied, but inmensely more intense: the smoke of the tavy, the fabrication of bricks, the pepper seeds drying under the sun in the streets, the zebu, the sweat,the forest, the soil, the food on preparation, the market, the flowers of the coffee trees that suddenly appeared one morning and vanished barely five days after, flooding everything with their parfum...